The Mommy Miracle (9 page)

Oh, well, there'd be another time. Jodie walked up to the patiently standing horse. “Hi, Bess,” she said softly.

Bess turned a big brown eye toward her, and gave a satiny little prod with her nose. Recognition? Probably. Horses had good memories. Jodie rubbed the horsey face gently, fighting to keep her coordination so that it felt good on Bess's shaggy cheek. “There? Is that okay? Is that how you like it, Bessie-girl?”

Katrina brought a mounting block, something Jodie had never needed before. Then, remembering, she proclaimed, “My helmet!”

“Here,” said Anna. She'd crossed the soft sawdust with barely a sound. “It's been hanging on the hook behind the office door this whole time.”

“Need help?” Dev offered.

“I'm fine.” But it was tricky, and in the end she couldn't manage the helmet's plastic catch and had to accept his offer. His fingers brushed her jawline and the tender skin beneath her chin as he fastened the clasp and she closed her eyes, thinking of last night. Was Katrina watching? Could she see…?

See that I'm thinking about kissing him, about feeling him inside me.

It had kept her awake for far too long. The need and wanting. The powerful body memories. The regret. Why had she let it happen? Why had his vulnerability caught so strongly at her heart? Why hadn't she found
a different way to respond? How could her awareness of him surge so fast when she had so much else to deal with? It didn't make sense. She didn't want it.

And she didn't want one simple brush of his fingers to take her back to last night with such immediacy and power. The clasp snapped into place and she stepped back, unsteady but very relieved.

“Ready?” Katrina asked.

“Not sure how we do this.”

“You've helped other riders a thousand times, Jodie.” Kat's voice was an odd mix of deference and encouragement. She was five years younger than Jodie, and had begun working here part-time at seventeen, when Jodie was twenty-two and already a well-qualified riding instructor. Their relationship of mentor and student had changed, too, because of the accident. “You were the one who taught me how to assist a rider with special needs, remember?”

“Different when it's me. Different when my legs don't work right. Can we talk it through?”

“Of course.” Katrina talked her through each movement, where each hand and foot went, when she would give a boost.

It felt wrong, and then as soon as she arrived in the saddle, she was at home. “Oh, Bessie, you good girl!”

The horse's broad back was alive and warm beneath the saddle, her mane shaggy in front. Jodie reached forward and ran her fingers awkwardly through it, while the familiar horsey smell rose to her nostrils. “Are you going to lead me, Kat?”

“Yep, if you want.”

“I haven't been led on a horse since I was seven years old!”

“Well, I could set up a show-jumping course for you,
with twelve fences and five-foot-high rails, but you'll have to give me a few minutes for that.”

“Okay, just for you, we'll save that for the next ride,” Jodie said.

It was so weird and at the same time so good. Katrina led Bess at a walk, and the horse's rocking rhythm was more even and steady than Jodie could yet manage on her own legs. This was one of the benefits of therapeutic riding. It gave people a sense of the natural rhythm of movement that they might never have experienced on their own.

Soon she was smiling broadly. Her family had never understood her passion for horses. Where had it come from? No one knew. No one else shared it. No cowboys or rodeo riders in the family history, that they knew of. But somehow it was just there, growing in her bones from when she was seven years old and had taken her first pony ride on the woolly back of a chubby Shetland pony.

Sitting on Bess now, she felt like
herself
for the first time since the slow slide out of her coma, and it was so wonderful to discover that the old Jodie still existed somewhere inside her, even if her body couldn't show it yet.

I'm me. I'm still me.

And I'm a mother. I have a baby girl.

“Could DJ come up here with me?” She didn't even think about it, just said it.

The baby was awake now, Jodie knew, because she could hear the start of some little fussing sounds coming from the car carrier. Dev had turned a couple of times to check on her. She was getting bored, all the way over there on the bleachers. Maybe she couldn't
see her mommy riding, from so far away, and wanted to take a closer look.

Katrina asked Bess to halt. “Could she? I think it's up to you, Jodie. You know better than me that Bess is the safest horse in the world, and she's not depending on your cues with the reins. You want to sit DJ up there and hold her?”

“Is it okay with you, Dev?” It felt strange to be looking down on him. He stood there, watching her intently, head a little tilted to one side, eyes narrowed. She must have shocked him with the idea of having DJ up on a horse at less than four months old, but not a bad shock, apparently. He was thinking about it, not rejecting it.

Jodie held her breath.
Please agree. Please. Just say yes. Don't question it.

If he wanted to know why it was so important, she knew couldn't explain in words.

“She does seem to be getting a little bored over there.” He'd echoed her own thought. “You think she's going to be a pony gal, like her mom?”

“Hope so!”

He gave a brief nod, didn't say anything out loud, then began walking in DJ's direction. A minute later he'd unstrapped her and brought her over. She was wriggling, sitting up in his arms. She was reaching the same kinds of milestones as Jodie herself. Growing stronger. Becoming more alert.

“How is this going to work?” Dev asked.

“Could you hand her up to me? And then keep ahold of her, just in case? I'll sit her here at the front of the saddle so she's leaning against my stomach. If you just put a hand on her front…”

“Should work,” he agreed.

DJ seemed to like the idea. She was waving her arms,
taking happy little breaths and making sounds. Katrina stood beside Bess's head, stroking her nose and cheek and telling her, “You're getting another passenger, but she doesn't weigh a whole lot. Is this a first for you? I think so.”

Dev lifted DJ up and settled her against Jodie's front. Jodie wrapped a hand around her middle and found Dev's hand there already, as she'd asked. Their fingers touched and laced together because there was no room for them to do anything else, and the downy back of DJ's little head bumped gently against Jodie's stomach.

With Dev's other arm behind her on the saddle, she felt so close to him. Closer, in some ways, than she'd felt last night with his hands and mouth on her breasts. He could have pillowed his head against her thigh by moving just an inch or two. She remembered what he'd said that first evening at his place, when she'd learned the truth about DJ's birth.
We're a family.
For the first time, with Bess's warm, living strength beneath her, and DJ and Dev both so close, she actually believed it might be true.

“She seems real excited about this,” Katrina commented.

“Is she smiling, Kat?”

“No, not smiling, but so alert. Are we standing still, or walking?”

“Walking,” Jodie answered. “Ready when you are, Kat. Dev, are you? Will you be able to keep pace in that position?”

“I'm fine. She is really happy, look at her, she's bouncing.”

“Still not smiling? I can't see.”

“Serious, still, but so eager. You're not missing any
thing by not seeing her face. It's her body doing the talking.”

“Oh, it is, I can feel it. Oh, DJ, you're so happy, aren't you?”

Not smiling, but maybe just as good.

Katrina clicked her tongue and told Bess to walk, and the wonderful rocking motion of the horse began again. Her hooves barely made a sound on the soft sawdust, and when they passed the big open doors where the sun came streaming in, her brown coat gleamed. DJ bounced and made her cooing and gurgling sounds. Dev muttered, “Just managing to keep up, here” beneath his breath, and then, a little louder, said, “She's loving it. Isn't she?”

All Jodie could say was, “Oh! Oh!” Her face hurt from smiling, and her vision blurred with tears.

I'm holding her and it feels right. We're on a horse together and she loves it. She feels like my daughter. My very own daughter. For the first time. I can feel it. I can feel what Dev feels about her. If only I could see her face! That's the only way this could be any better. I never understood. I never knew this was how it could feel.

Oh. Oh.

There were just no words.

 

I must not let her see how scared I am,
Dev thought.

It was perfectly safe. He knew it with his head. His heart couldn't feel it. DJ? His precious baby girl? Fifteen weeks old and on a horse, five long feet from the ground?

But he could see what it was doing for Jodie and that made the fear unimportant. It was such a beautiful sight. Jodie's smile. DJ's excited bouncing, her little mouth
open but serious, her hands batting in the air. The horse so slow and steady and patient.

He had to walk almost leaning against the warm equine body in order to keep one hand in place against DJ's stomach. The other hand he rested on the back of the saddle, an inch from Jodie's rounded backside. She'd worn stretchy jodhpurs, sand-colored, because that was what she always wore for riding, and man those things looked good on a woman's body!

His half-side-on position gave him a perfect view of the rhythmic rock of her hips in the saddle, and the only thing that stopped him looking too long and hard and thinking all sorts of forbidden thoughts about last night and those rocking hips on the warm hood of the car was the better view he got from looking higher up, where the big, teary-eyed, dazzling grin on her face just wouldn't go away, and the slight crookedness and lack of control in her arms and shoulders didn't seem to matter at all.

“Oh!” she kept saying.
“Ohh!”
And kind of laughing and crying at the same time, while DJ sat pressed up against her and all that Jodie body language of reluctance about holding and touching her baby had miraculously gone.

He wanted to wrap his arms around her and plant exuberant smooches of congratulation all over her face.
You're amazing!
He wanted to soften those same arms and give her kisses that were tender and wondering and soft on her mouth.
You're amazing.

This was what he'd been drawn to at eighteen, even though he'd never acknowledged or acted on it back then. This was what still drew him—the combination of fragility and strength, the petite body that had a war
rior's fight in it, the determination and perseverance along with a huge, dazzling, sexy smile.

If this was his old life, in New York, he knew what his next move would be. Whisk her away somewhere so that this fizzing need inside him could find a happy release. Ten days in Paris, a three-day weekend in the Bahamas. It had worked for him, in the past.

He always picked the right kind of woman, sophisticated and high maintenance and impossibly well-groomed. Always had a great time, while in the back of his mind—and the woman's—the clock ticked and the objections mounted up.

He couldn't have spent his life with a woman whose grooming rituals took up two hours of every single day. She—a series of them, over the years—couldn't have spent hers with someone who read the international section of the newspaper every day like he was prepping for an exam and then actually wanted to
talk
about it. He couldn't have seriously fallen for someone who paid that much attention to shoes and whose voice went whiny and childlike the moment she didn't get her own way. A few weeks together, though…great.

He'd been smug about it, he now realized. He'd been far too certain and confident about his choices. The right kind of relationship, with the right kind of woman. He'd had it all sewn up, all his bases covered.

Jodie wasn't the right kind of woman.

But she was the mother of his child.

And he'd be stepping back from the whole situation as soon as she was able to take care of DJ herself, as soon as he trusted that they had the right arrangement in place. It was the only thing that made sense. It was—even though they never said it straight out—what her family wanted.

But hell, she looked fabulous up there, grinning from ear to ear, with DJ nestled against her front. He didn't want it to end.

His first inkling of the new arrivals was the sound of Barbara Palmer's voice. “Oh, sweet jeepers, and she has the baby up there, too!”

Before Katrina, Jodie or Dev himself could react, Barb and Lisa came hurrying across the arena. He couldn't see them fully, as Bess's body masked his view, but there could be no doubt about their attitude. Katrina told Bess to halt, which she obediently did, while Jodie had stiffened in the saddle and tightened her arm around the baby.

Dev tightened his own fingers, so that their two hands were knotted tightly together. He felt Jodie squeezing, and squeezed her back.
It's okay, they seemed to be saying to each other. We're in this together, and we're not going to apologize for any of it.
He came so close to laying his cheek against her thigh.

You're amazing….

“It's fine, Mom,” she said. “Katrina has the horse, Dev has DJ, nothing bad is going to happen.”

“It's not fine! How can you be so irresponsible with your own daughter? How can you even put this as a priority, coming here, at this point in your rehab? Getting on a
horse?
When walking and showering and brushing your hair are still so much of a challenge? How can you?”

“I thought you had errands this morning.”